Cat Power at the Knitting Factory

February 23, 2003

For a Cat Power show, I thought it went fairly smoothly. By that I mean that about half the songs got somewhere close to completion, she apologized for sucking only about eight or nine times, and she stayed on stage for an entire hour. I’ve been caught saying that I’d listen to Chan Marshall sing a phonebook, and for some parts of the concert, she may have been. Nervous and jittery, she made up one song on the spot and sang snippets of about 20 others. It feels less like a concert than hanging out in your friend’s bedroom as she jams along and goofs on her instruments. I’m not sure most people would put up with it, but when she does come through it’s so painfully beautiful that I’d be hard pressed to say that it wasn’t worth the wait. It’s really that good. The piano ballads worked best, and her cover of Satisfaction is probably one of my favorite covers ever. She never sings the chorus until one longing reading towards the end of her arrangement.

I think the show would have went along better if the Knitting Factory didn’t suck so much as a venue. For a name venue, I was kind of stunned at how bad it was. It’s a small floor with a small balcony, with a bar in the back of the floor. It’s small and it’s intimate, but the sight lines are atrocious. Chan performs sitting down, so for the first portion of the show, I saw the top of her head. Once I got a better angle, I got to see her whole head. Wheeeeee! The balcony overhangs the floor in the back AND the sides, so there’s really only a small portion of the floor that isn’t claustrophobic. Because Chan only plays either a guitar or a piano while singing, it’s always a very sparse sound. This isn’t really a problem at a lot of venues, but at the Factory you can hear the bar clinking constantly, and one of the ventilation pipes would rattle heinously when Chan would strum an open E. Add this to the fact that a lot of the crowd towards the back decided to talk openly during the show, and it was a pretty frustrating evening. I swear, the stuff I put up with sometimes.

Posted in From Blown Speakers